Life is funny. You go through life planning and working and meeting and hoping, and then one day you wake up and you come to find a metallic shade of yourself that didn’t exist before. How did you get that way? What brought you there? How did you make it that far? Well, there’s the constant cleansing and polishing: the thinking, the waiting, the dreaming, the doing. And somewhere among all that, there’s plenty of time to wonder. You wonder if you’ve made the right choices — if you’re going to make more bad ones. You wonder how it’s going to end. You wonder if anyone will notice. You wonder what it all means.

And the answer to all of these is, of course, yes. And no. And everything in between. You make the best decisions you can at the time you have to make them, and in doing your best to keep that in perspective, you hope you haven’t fucked up too bad.

No one’s trying to kill you — well, that you know of. You pay your taxes. You’re not a meth addict. No prison tats. You’ve got a car, a home and a cat. You’ve got some great people around you who, for reasons only gawd knows, have put up with your bullshit more often than they’ve told you to go jump in a lake. Your life may be in a period of transition, but all things considered, you’re not doing too bad.

Just a little more polish and you’ll be looking mighty sharp. Yeah, that’s it. Turning silver isn’t that easy, you know. The smudges don’t go away on their own. I’m sure you will make more mistakes, but you’ll also have more successes. You’re up to the challenge. It won’t be perfect, but really, what is? After all, there’s no manual.

Some more polish and a little elbow grease, and people will say, “Damn, look at that one! It’s really beaming!” And hopefully, when they open the books, you’ll have won more than you lost. Really, that’s all you can expect. The rest is garnish, complimentary to your shiny metal finish.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr. was born on this day in 1914 and died on 17 August, 1988 — his 74th birthday; and though you’re nowhere near there yet, there’s something about that sort of cyclical journey that is just fascinating. He ended up being fairly shiny in his own right. Here’s hoping you don’t let your brothers in time, or anyone else, down during your own journey. But don’t worry — I’ll keep some extra polish on hand.

Happy birthday to you, Mr. Lanphear. Shine on.

Signing off this journal for a while.  You can find me on Twitter, where with any luck, I won’t be able to do any damage.

The events of today strangely — eerily, in fact — mirror something that happened just over two years ago, something that changed me for likely the rest of my life, something that made me think twice. Three times, even. And while this situation is not nearly as serious, it hurts similarly, only with less emphasis.

I don’t know if I have the energy left to fully explain the hopelessness I feel at this precise moment. I will, however, say this: It seems that no matter what I say or the manner in which I say it, someone I care about will either hurt because of it or, at the very least, be offended by it.

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I serve on a team of three people responsible for the overall use and direction of techops.net, which is the support center for Dragon*Con tech staff. The site runs everything: our mailing list, the staff database, tracking of hours worked for each staffer, etc. So in essence, without the tools available on that site, tech staff does not work. Do not pass go, do not collect pie.

Every year after the end of the convention, we sit down at the geekfarm and start brainstorming the tasks we need to accomplish before the next con. And then over the following weeks, we formulate those ideas into specific tasks and get working. In fact, one of my cohorts and I always used to joke that the webteam was the only group inside of tech staff that had no “off-season”. And while it was always something we laughed at, I think that the reason we were laughing was because we knew it was true. At least, that’s how it’s been in the past.

For me, things are still that way. I take a great amount of pride in the work I’ve put into that site, and I’m glad that I contribute in some way to making peoples’ jobs easier. So here I sit, taking a break from my latest batch of code, to get this stuff off my chest and out of my head.

I’ve been working on quite a lot of .net-related stuff over the past several months. I’d like to say “we’ve been working”, referring to the webteam as a whole, but truthfully, that hasn’t been happening.

You see, life gets in the way. Right after the convention, Q started a new job that she’s been excelling in, which, as I’ve said before, is awesome. P has been doing his thing, and I’ve followed the various projects he’s been a part of to see what he’s up to. There’s a downside to this, though, and it’s that other things, other tasks get put on the back burner, and over the past several months, that’s been the site for which all three of us are responsible.

I, on the other hand, have been steadily busy. This is partly because of my recent acquisition of quite a bit of free time, and so initially I thought that I shouldn’t be hard on others who don’t have as much free time as I do.

But then I got to thinking. I’m really not doing anything that I wasn’t doing before, including the period where I had two full-time jobs, one of them in website development. Those other things, even when you add in the social life and the various other etcetera that everyone deals with on a daily basis, didn’t prevent me from meeting my schedule for tasks that I needed to do.  It’s remarkably easy to make time for something when you feel it’s important.

And so my frustration with others grows because I know what I am capable of, and so it makes me wonder why others aren’t the same way. Do they have other priorities?

Well, of course they do. Everyone does. That’s where life intervenes, and people, jobs, hobbies all take their slice of the pie. I certainly don’t begrudge anyone that, but that only excuses a portion of it. I’m annoyed that over the past three years, we’ve tripled the size of the webteam and yet now one person is doing the majority of the work. I’m annoyed that everything has come down to me. Almost without exception, everything we put on the drawing board just after Dragon*Con 2006, including some of the “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we had this” stuff, I’ve either fully or mostly implemented with very little feedback from others. Add to that the new responsibility of hosting the site on my server for free, and it makes me feel a little more stretched. I don’t feel unappreciated in so much as I feel overwhelmed.

So earlier today, I sent an e-mail to my associates on the webteam regarding a rather important component of the site that would have already been launched if I had more help, and tried to be as cordial as I was able, but I’m afraid that the level of frustration I felt when I wrote it was probably evident. The fact of the matter is that yes, I am frustrated, not at any one person per se, but moreso at the situation that busy lives often cause.

As a friend said to me about the situation:

This is the big problem with volunteer programs. When people get bored, work stops getting done. […] Barring lighting a fire under their asses, the only solution I really know is to recruit new blood, get them excited, and use them until they get bored again.

And therein lies the problem. Either people come around and help out, or they don’t. Unlike other areas of staff, I can’t pick a person out of the crowd and say, “You there, whip me up some code!” What we do has a very different dynamic than what most people traditionally volunteer for. And it makes me almost sad in a way, because not only do I love working with these people when the machine is firing on all cylinders, but outside of this wacky thing we call Dragon*Con, they’re some of the best friends and best people you will ever meet. I just hate feeling like I’m stuck on an island because someone swiped my life raft.

Welcome to the return of chrislanphear.com. Let’s see how this goes…

I’m back on Last.fm.

Tried out the Safari browser for Windows. It’s no Firefox … but I kinda want a Mac.  🙂

Most of you who know me know that I don’t care for PC games in general, which is why this recommendation might hold a bit more water. Give And Yet It Moves and Sumotori Dreams a download, now! They both seem deceptively simple, but therein lies the game. (Warning: Highly Addictive!)

This may be old news to some, but I just saw it: Concrete proof that the Chinese will bootleg ANYTHING.

I seriously doubt this is an attempt at viral marketing or cross-promotion on the part of Twentieth Century Fox for the upcoming “Simpsons” movie, but it turns out that the Crazy Cat Lady really does exist, but her name isn’t Eleanor Abernathy. It’s Mary Kalin-Casey.

According to The New York Times, this woman, who I’m guessing is either trying to sniff out a quick paycheck or is really just that much in need of attention, is very upset at Google and the new Street View feature on their Maps service. She claims that the service is an invasion of her privacy because, using the Street View, you can faintly make out her cat in the foto of her apartment building.

In a post to BoingBoing, Ms. Kalin-Casey writes:

“I’m all for mapping, but this feature literally gives me the shakes. I feel like I need to close all my curtains now.”

Now, as I was reading the article, my first thought was that she was one of those people like my grandmother who just fears technology and the internet in general. But as it happens, she’s a former movie critic for Reel.com! And she’s worried about privacy…

In my opinion, nothing posted online relinquishes one’s right to privacy, but the fact that someone can see a [very] blurry picture of your cat’s face from a public street is NOT an invasion of your privacy!

I guess what bothers me the most about this is the fact that this woman is so self-involved or fearful as to think that the public at large is really that interested in spying on her cat using the internet. Although, in a world of lolcats, it’s entirely possible that I could be wrong.

It’s yet another example of how this American populace is driven first and foremost by fear instead of anything resembling logic or reason.

Gotta love the Crazy Cat Lady.

The Simpsons Movie is in theaters on July 27th. 🙂